PROLOGUE

9:52pm on a Thursday night. All that stands between me and this email, an email I have absolutely no business sending, is one click.

It's February 2025. I'm at my screen, and I've just written to a man I've never met, applying for a job that does not exist, using a title I invented forty minutes ago. My finger is hovering over send.

Some reasonable, well-meaning part of me, the part that has kept me safe and small my whole life, is saying the obvious things. Don't. This is embarrassing. Who do you think you are. And then it plays its best card, the test I run on everything: if this became public, would I be comfortable? I imagine it. The email, read out loud. Someone on his team forwarding it with a laughing emoji. And the honest answer, that night, is no. No, I would not be comfortable.

Which is exactly why the next thing I did still surprises me.

I want you to hold that image, because everything in this book grows out of the half-second that came next. Not a strategy. Not a genius master plan. A near-miss. The woman with her finger over that button is the same one now writing a book about why we don't dare and she is still here. I can still feel, precisely, what she was feeling. That's not a memory I reach for. It's one that I kept with me.

Here's the context.

Steven Bartlett, entrepreneur, investor and creator of The Diary of a CEO, had posted a job opening. He was looking, he said, for people who think differently, who challenge the status quo, who bring disproportionate value. And something in me flatly refused to let it scroll past.

So, I wrote to him. Not for a normal role, I invented one. I told him I wanted to be his Business Révolutionnaire, accent and all, and then, because I have never once in my life been able to leave well enough alone, I explained at length exactly what that meant. I offered myself as "the wild card, the person you call when you need a game-changing idea." I informed him, with total sincerity, that being a revolutionary was "in my DNA", on the grounds that I am French. I wrote a sentence I would only understand much later:

"I see opportunities where others see limitations."

"I'm not just looking to fill a role. I want to create something that didn't exist before."

I read those lines back now and they stop me in my tracks because I was typing the synopsis of this book into a cover letter at ten o'clock on a wintry Thursday night, and I had no idea. The words were already in me. I just assumed I couldn’t make them my own or build something of my own around them.

Just for the pleasure of sharing the entire story, here’s the email.

Steven, I should report, never got back to me, an oversight I've since forgiven him for, given how it all turned out.

So, with no one left to be a Business Révolutionnaire for, I did the only logical thing left: the one thing I never thought I could do.

I became one. I built LaRévolution myself.

What I rarely say out loud is the state I was in when I did it. It came at the end of one of the hardest stretches of my life, the kind that strips you down to a single, unavoidable question: what are you actually going to do with yourself? And the night I decided, sitting with my husband, I said something I still remember word for word.

“I don't want to be a cringe entrepreneur.”

You know the ones. The people who start things and don't fit the mould, not the company's mould, not the corporate one, not the one that says you work nine to six and keep your weekends sacred. The ones who seem to operate on a slightly different planet. Who you can't quite file. Who are a little too independent, a little too much. Half of me wanted precisely what they had: the freedom to be themselves out loud, without apologising for it. The other half was scared. Not nervous, scared. Scared of becoming someone people glance at sideways. Scared of not fitting anywhere anymore.

I almost let that fear cast the deciding vote. It came that close.

Now skip forward. A little over a year. This morning, in fact, the actual morning I'm writing these words.

I asked Claude, one of the AI tools I work with, for my morning brief. Coffee, screen, the unremarkable opening of a normal day. And somewhere in it was a line about the proposals I'd sent out, to clients, to people deciding whether to work with me or not.

I read the number twice. Then, I'll admit, a third time, in case the first two had been a clerical error on the part of reality.

Sitting in my pipeline, waiting on a signature, were €294,850 of decisions. Not a vague projection. Real decisions, into human hands, waiting for a yes.

Does that sound like a lot to you? Maybe not. Maybe you close numbers like that every day and I should keep it to myself. But the entire point of this book is to stop pretending, so I won't start now: to me, that morning, it was staggering. The Fiorella of a year ago, the one with her finger trembling over send, would not have believed this sentence. She'd have read it as someone else's story. And I'm fairly certain the Fiorella of next year will glance back at this number, the one that staggered me this morning and find it sweetly, almost touchingly, small.

That gap between what I couldn't believe a year ago and what I'll outgrow a year from now, is not a story about money. People have asked me how I got here and told me how incredible it seems. I always struggle with that question because, honestly, I’m only at the beginning. But perhaps that’s the point: the answer to how I got here is the very story this book tells.

So let me tell you what this book is and what it isn't.

It is not my last one. The Retail Revolution was built for a precise job: to help DIY suppliers find their way through the maze of retail. This isn't that. If you came for the tactics, the buyer's psychology, the war stories from the negotiation table, I have written that, and I will write more of it but not here.

And it isn't a memoir. I'm thirty-one. I'm counting on at least another sixty years, more if the science keeps its promises. It's far too early for me to be looking back; I'm very much still in it, occasionally upside down.

This is something else. It's about something I noticed and then could not un-notice. Something I learned slowly, from my corporate journey to my entrepreneur adventure. Honestly, it's something I should have written before The Retail Revolution, it sits underneath that book, underneath most of what I think about on any given day. And the Universe knows how many things I think about in a given day.

Because the reality is: I became the cringe entrepreneur I swore to my husband I would never be.

And I love it.

I believe I'm operating, right now, at roughly 1 to 2% of what I'm capable of, not as false modesty, but as a genuine, slightly vertiginous estimate of the distance between where I am and where I could go.

But this book is not about me. The pipeline, the Thursday-night email, the capabilities, those are just the door. At the heart of this book is a question I have carried with me for longer than I realised. By the final page, I want you to be carrying it too.

We have never lived in a world this open. Never this much information, this many tools, this many people within reach, this many doors standing unlocked at once. By every measure that counts, the walls are gone.

So why does almost everyone I meet talk as if the doors are closing?

I think I know. I don't believe the walls disappeared, I feel we kept building them on the inside, where they don't show, where they pass for good judgement. I think the most capable people I know are standing in front of openings they genuinely cannot see, held back by something that feels like prudence and is, on closer inspection, just fear wearing a different suit.

And I think it can be undone. Not the fear, that part stays, and I'll be honest with you about it the whole way through. But the standing still. The waiting. The quiet conviction that the bold version of your life belongs to braver, stranger, luckier people than you.

It doesn't. It never did.

If you take one thing from these pages, let it be this: you are far closer to your own beginning than you think. And you do not need to stop being afraid to take it.

You only need to stop waiting for the fear to go first. 

We are going to climb the echelons together. Step by step, we will gain altitude, not to look down on where we are today, but to see it more clearly. By the middle of this book, I want you to have enough distance to look at your business, your choices and yourself from a different perspective, and to make decisions that are truly your own. We will climb into your capabilities, challenge the way you think, and stretch what you believe you are capable of becoming. And yes, at times, it may feel less like climbing a straight staircase and more like finding your way up a spiral one, wondering whether you are actually getting anywhere. You are. So, take a breath, trust the journey, and let’s climb these echelons together.

Be ready for the ascent. I’m counting on you.

- Fiorella

ECHELON 1 THE WORLD HAS NO WALLS ANYMORE

Anything you want today is accessible. Don't you think?

Take the most human example there is. You can now choose your life partner on a limitless app. Swipe, and there's another face. Swipe, and another. Each one a possible life, a possible kitchen on a Sunday morning, a possible argument about whose turn it is to empty the dishwasher. And here's the strange thing you already know if you've ever used one: the more you scroll, the more you want to keep scrolling. Not because the person in front of you is wrong, because the next one might be better. Better has no finish line.

The app never runs out. Your time does.

Hold that feeling. We'll come back to it.

You want to learn to be a finance director? YouTube is full of content that smart creators upload every single day, free, and if you want the diploma to frame, the paid certification is two clicks further. You want to learn music? Same. A language? Same. You want a new assistant, one who reads faster than you, never sleeps, and doesn't take offense when you delete everything they wrote? AI will build you one with whatever skills you need, and it will take about few minutes.

I want to be clear before we go any further: I am not here to alarm you. I believe this new world is magic. Genuinely. It is full of possibilities no generation before us has ever had at our fingertips. You can keep a real relationship with someone on the opposite side of the planet. You can get an answer to almost any question in less than three seconds. Someday soon, you might talk more to an AI than to your life partner, and I'm not entirely sure the AI won't be the better listener on certain days. We are, in a very real sense, never completely alone anymore. Our problems can be solved faster than at any point in human history.

The doors are open. All of them. That's the fact this whole book stands on, so I want to make sure you feel it, not just nod at it.

This is what it looks like from inside my world.

A few months ago, an Australian brand contacted me. Out of nowhere. I checked, we were a level-3 connection on LinkedIn, which is the platform's way of saying you have absolutely nothing in common with this person. No shared contact. No mutual relation. No conference where we'd crossed paths. Someone on the literal other side of the planet had found me, read what I put out into the world, and decided we could potentially work together.

Fifteen years ago, that kind of connection was far more difficult. Not impossible. Just far more difficult. There was no path from them to me. The path would have required a trade show, a mutual acquaintance, a flight, a business card, and about eighteen months of luck. Today it required none of those things. The wall between an Australian brand and a French strategist simply doesn't exist anymore. Nobody tore it down ceremoniously. It just quietly stopped being there.

Or take something less glamorous. For years, part of my job was analysing private-label tenders in hardware. Let me paint you the real picture, because "analysing tenders" sounds clean and it was anything but: one tender, two thousand product lines, twelve retail banners across the world, fifteen suppliers, seven different purchasing options (incoterm). Weeks of my life. The volume of data was so violent that before I could even start, I had to build a methodology just to know which questions I was trying to answer, otherwise the spreadsheet would swallow me whole. Determining the best supplier was an expedition.

Today, AI does that analysis in three clicks and one good prompt.

Let me paint you the picture. Weeks of a skilled buyer's work, the thing that was, in part, my professional value, compressed into an afternoon coffee break. Now, in fairness, not every company allows these tools yet, and we will talk about that resistance later, because it's a wall of its own. But the capability exists. It's sitting right there. The expedition became a shortcut, and most of the industry is still packing for the expedition, instead of discovering.  

And the walls keep falling further down the chain. Marketplaces have opened doors that used to be locked with multiple keys: you can sit in your kitchen in France and buy the knobs for that kitchen directly from the manufacturer in China or India. No importer, no wholesaler, no retailer. The final customer, connected straight to the factory. When I started in this industry, that entire chain of intermediaries was the industry. Each link existed because connecting a French homeowner to a factory in Shenzhen was genuinely hard. It isn't hard anymore.

And yet. For every wall that falls, you'll find someone standing exactly where the wall used to be, behaving as if it were still there. I met two of them within the same quarter, and I've kept them in mind ever since, because together they explain something no single person could.

The first I met at a trade show. Outdoor products, a man in his forties, solid business. The conversation came around to AI, as every conversation now does, and he told me, flatly: "I don't believe in AI."

I don't believe in it. As if it were a rumor. As if artificial intelligence were an opinion you could decline, like a dessert menu. When I dug a little, what came out was more honest than his opening line: he was convinced AI would eventually replace parts of his job, and he believed in human connection. Which means, if you listen carefully, that he did believe in AI, enough to be afraid of it.

“I don't believe in it” wasn't a position. It was a door he was holding shut.

The second one, I came across on LinkedIn first. A leader in a technical field, and he'd written a post, confident, polished, the kind that collects likes: AI will change everything.

We had lunch some time later, and I was genuinely curious, so I asked him the only question that matters: "What is it actually changing in your company?"

And he couldn't tell me.

Not wouldn't, couldn't. There was some vague gesturing at "efficiency" and "the future," a small tour of the usual words. But nothing specific. Not one process, not one role, not one decision that had actually changed inside his own walls. The man who publicly believed AI would change everything could not name a single thing it was changing for him.

Now put these two people side by side, because together they form a picture that neither forms alone. On the surface, they hold opposite positions, one rejects the revolution, the other proclaims it. It looks like conviction versus conviction. But listen again. One is driven by fear dressed up as skepticism. The other, by an inability to commit to anything specific, dressed up as vision. Opposite costumes. Same body underneath.

Two individuals, handed the most open world in human history. And neither of them actually standing anywhere in it.

Why? Hold the question. That's not this chapter's job. This chapter's job is only to make sure you see the open doors clearly, because you can't understand what's strange about people standing still until you've really measured how open everything around them is.

Which brings me to a story that shouldn't exist. Mine.

I became a buyer at Adeo, the world's number three DIY retailer, Europe's number one, at twenty-three years old.

I want you to understand how improbable that sentence is, so let me give you the full inventory of what I did not have. I did not come from a prestigious school. My studies were a zigzag, law, then B2B, then retail, and the oldest around me were not thrilled about the scenic route, trust me. My teachers, mentors and my family kept asking me to choose, telling me my CV "didn't tell a coherent story." Classmates openly laughed at me because I didn't speak a word of English, not bad English, no English. And I had no clue about the buying process, no clue about negotiation, no network, no map.

What I had was an internship of 5 years across very different role and a last one as a product assistant, a capacity for work that came from always having to catch up on the previous school's curriculum, and a manager named François who looked at me one day and said: "You have a head for buying."

That sentence changed my life. And I've thought about it often since, because François wasn't reading my diploma, there was nothing really coherent to read. He was betting on something the old world's filters couldn't see.

At twenty-eight, I jumped to Kingfisher, into the buying office. My first year, I visited nearly thirty suppliers. If you've never bought tools and hardware, here's what you need to know: every product is a different universe. A screw, a scaffold, and a toolbox have almost nothing in common, different materials, different processes, different physics, different ways a supplier can quietly cut a corner. You never stop learning, especially when the person across the table has your entire age in years of experience on that one category. I sat in those rooms at every one of those factories, the youngest person present, usually the only woman, always the one who supposedly had no business being there.

One confession about that year of thirty suppliers, since we're being honest with each other: I never really took the time to visit the cities. I flew in, saw the factory, flew out. Cities full of hidden treasures, and I saw their industrial zones.

Today, in my current life, I do the opposite, I walk into stores, I wander the neighborhoods, I take the culture in. Some lessons about what's actually available to you arrive late.

Now, you might read all this and think: she got lucky. And I understand the reflex. A twenty-three-year-old buyer at a global retailer sounds like an anomaly, a lottery ticket.

As I write these lines, eight years later, Gen Z and Millennials together represent about forty-seven percent of the world's population. Nearly one human in two. I'm what they call a Zillennial[1], born in the seam between the two. And my generation is now walking into rooms nobody expected us to enter, at ages nobody planned for, much like I did when I became a buyer at a global DIY retailer at twenty-three. What looked like an anomaly in my case is quietly becoming the norm. The improbable story isn’t so improbable anymore.

That's what a world without walls does. It doesn't announce itself. It just starts letting the supposed-wrong people in, the ones without the coherent CV, without the right school, without the English. And then one day they're half the population, and the people across the table are the ones who need to adapt.

So, let's paint the full picture, one last time, all of it side by side.

You can find a partner through an app that never runs out of faces. You can connect with anyone on earth through social media, including an Australian brand finding a French strategist with zero mutual contacts. You can learn any skill from an ocean of content, most of it free. You can ask any question and get the answer in less than three seconds. You can buy any product from anywhere, factory to doorstep. You can compress weeks of expert analysis into three clicks. You can become a buyer at a global giant at twenty-three without speaking the language of the meetings.

How does all of that sound, said in one breath?

Limitless. Yes. That's the word. Our world is limitless, and you can be who you want, where you want, in a way that no other humans in history could.

In fact, when I look around honestly, I can only find two things left that are truly limited.

Time.

And the human brain.

The first one, you already knew. The second one is why this book exists.

[1] A Zillennial is someone born roughly between 1993 and 1998, on the cusp between Millennials (1981–1996) and Gen Z (1997–2012). They grew up during the transition from an analogue, pre-smartphone world to the fully digital world, experiencing both sides of that shift.